Saturday, October 06, 2007

Names

I get into obsessive discussions about names more often most, I'd think. I know a mathematician who had a dog (or cat or hamster or whatever) and he called it Lemma. About children, I always thought naming them X, Y, X^2, Y^2 etc has certain chromosomal sanity and scalability, and will generate polynomial families. Then there are jokes that are somewhat ethnic in which you use a generic name (say Ivan for simpleton Russian, smart Jack or John in southern US who defeats Ole Massa, trickster Malese in Haiti) or there are generic jokes in which you use an ethnic name and localize them. For example, the name in the jokes here can be a dynamic variable that can be swapped for any user-specified name string.